Modern poetry

Good companions

Verse to lull you and to wake you up

HERE are two of the sadder truths about poetry. First, it is much esteemed, but much less read; second, the dead are more in favour than the living. So how can it be made to seem more companionable?

One way is to survey the terrain from a considerable height by dipping into a good anthology. “The Oxford Book of American Poetry”, edited by David Lehman, a poet and critic, is such a book. Its last edition was published 30 years ago and Mr Lehman's approach is markedly different. The book still begins with American poetry in its 17th-century infancy, but pays much more attention to living and recent poets: a quarter way through, readers are well into the 20th century.

The anthology includes many more poets than the last edition, smaller names as well as big ones, and it is a more complete record of poetry's place in the wider world of popular culture. A famous blues lyric by Bessie Smith is here, and also “Desolation Row”, one of Bob Dylan's best lyrics. In this way the book is not only a sound historical survey, but also gives the reader a powerful taste of poetry's impact upon the wider world.

Well represented in the anthology is Billy Collins, an American poet whose new collection, “The Trouble with Poetry”, has just been published. Mr Collins is unusual in several respects. His poetry, by the sheer force of its humour and general amiability, reaches out to a wide audience. He writes with great fluency and is the least self-consciously obscure of poets: you don't find yourself snagged on a word that has spent most of its life slumbering in a dictionary. His verse pokes fun at the posturing that poets get up to from time to time. In short, his poems, which inveigle their meanings very delicately, seem to refresh the world in which we live, and make it seem as if good poetry—and this is very good poetry—would be not too hard to write. Just you try.

Tony Connor is a British poet of force, clarity and honest craft. “Things Unsaid” gathers together some of the best of what he has written over the past 60 years. In the 1960s, he was writing about growing up in a working-class area in England's industrial north, and the mood and atmosphere of these early poems—dour and bolted-down—make the details ring as true as a hammer coming down on an anvil. Mr Connor feels both trapped and enthralled to have been, as he himself writes, “the sociable, lonely poet,/a rueful one-man sect,/in an ugly, ignorant city—his God-given subject.”

Mark Strand, whose 11th collection, “Man and Camel”, will be published in September, is also represented in the Oxford anthology. He writes short poems which read like dream-parables whose meanings the reader is forever on the point of seizing. They drift pleasingly along, like water finding its way through the landscape, or some small, vulnerable boat cast airily adrift on the sea. The subject of each one feels as if it is finding itself at the very moment of writing. They are lullingly musical—indeed, one entire sequence is a kind of loose interpretation of a quartet by the composer, Anton Webern. Perfect poems for the cocktail hour.

To jar yourself awake, almost chair-leapingly so, read “Gethsemane Day”, a collection published earlier this year by Dorothy Molloy, an Irish poet. This is a spiky, nervy book of poems, dramatic, and self-dramatising too, with some of the driven compulsiveness associated with Sylvia Plath. Except that there is more raucous fun in this book than ever found in Plath. The author writes about childbirth and mother-thraldom and Catholicism, and sometimes several of these themes at once, with a kind of raging, and occasionally black, gleefulness.

The truly sad fact is that, although this is only her second book of poems, Ms Molloy's great talent was snuffed out by cancer before even the first of her two books, “Hare Soup”, was published in 2004.